Friendship: The Forgotten Spiritual Discipline

By Pamela Baker Powell and Crystal L. Downing

We all need friends. This book is an exploration of Christian friendship. It turns out that friendship has one surprising, overlooked, almost forgotten spiritual quality.
Friendship in Christ is eternal. Scripture emphasizes this. Jesus himself emphasized this. Theologians emphasized this throughout the first thousand-plus years of Christian history. Then, it was somehow mostly neglected. This book maintains that friendship isn't just a passing luxury.
Participation in the joy of friendship is a spiritual blessing. It is an unrecognized spiritual discipline that enriches your soul eternally. Here you will have an opportunity to consider your friendships as more than a pleasant engagement and discover what they can mean for your life today and eternally. Join others on this exploration of the exciting truth that friendships are forever!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Apr 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9781666750386

Pamela Baker Powell

Pamela Baker Powell is an ordained minister and a former pastoral theology professor. She has focused her career on exploring the intertwining of Scripture and our daily lives. Her extensive research over the course of a decade led to the creation of a remarkable book on Christian friendship as a key element of spiritual formation and eternal blessing. Pam is married with three grown children and nine grandchildren. She cherishes the lifelong friendships she has nurtured throughout her life.

Book preview

1

Friendship

The Eternal Spiritual Blessing

I think about heaven a lot . . .

This is not new, I might add. I have thought about heaven a lot for well over half of my life. What most don’t expect in life happened to me. At thirty years old, my life, my nuclear family, was completed truncated, suddenly, unexpectedly, one night with no warning. When the phone call came at midnight I was awake, watching, hoping, praying, and I confess generally believing that things would work out, as they always did, somehow. That was not to be the case, and when the pastors came to tell me that they had found my husband’s body, I and my two little boys, one six years old and only a week from first grade, and my nine-month-old baby, entered a whole new element of life’s experience. Dare I even utter the words so boldly, death experience?

While our house seemed to fill up all night with family arriving, having traveled through the night, and friends from church bringing love and comfort, I found myself alone for a time upstairs in the master bedroom closet touching my husband’s clothes. Touching the wool suits, the navy sports jacket, the white shirts, the colorful ties, his neatly folded pajamas, pressing them each to my nose and inhaling deeply, hoping to catch a bit of the precious life that was still vivid in my life. If the truth is that there was only the faintest of aroma, there was nevertheless something else. A presence. A stillness. Quiet. My tears, which had not stopped until then, stopped. The spiritual was there somehow. So quiet. There was silence but not absence. I was still, motionless, unclear what was happening. In the midst of it, all I could offer was acceptance. I understand, I said quietly. What did that mean then? A word of comfort to my husband? Acceptance of what the Lord had ahead, perhaps, but I had no earthly idea what I was accepting.

Only a few nights later there was the dream. Vivid. I was walking with my boys in a dystopian woods—perhaps after a forest fire when the smoke had disappeared. Nothing remained but the fragmented trunks of trees and the crunch of the burned foliage beneath our feet. All of the horizon was dark, all around it was ash. I was holding my six-year-old son’s hand and the baby on my hip. We were walking into an oblivion, unseen, even foreboding, but mostly just barren and dark. I remember my awareness during that dream as if it had just occurred. Walking together there that night in the landscape view, we were completely alone and utterly helpless. Yet, I thought, I must take these children out of this darkness. How? I had no idea. I would like to say that it was then that an angel appeared or spoke to me or lifted us or delivered us—but that would not be the truth. No. What I recognized as there was just this sense: Keep walking. Keep holding onto the children.

In an experience like that, it is hard to not think about what comes after death, when after experiencing death, there certainly is something there beyond death. I know that.

All throughout my adult life, I have thought about it. I have thought about heaven a lot.

How did I come to this? About six years before, my husband and I had committed ourselves to reading straight through the New Testament without stopping in the month of July. This was an entirely intellectual exercise. We were reading in history and philosophy. This was just part of that ongoing endeavor. We had agreed to read independently each day and discuss each evening after dinner. We planned to be completely finished by July 31. Even though we had each been raised in the church, we had no idea whatsoever what a formidable and frankly dangerous exercise this was. We had progressed only through the first two or three Gospels, and we were believers. It just happened—to each of us. No one was more surprised than we were! We didn’t tell anyone for months. Honestly, we didn’t know what to make of it. During that time, we prayed, read, studied, sought out sources, and grew in our faith.

So let me tie the thread here between this early part of my Christian understanding to my recurrent reflection on heaven. From age twenty-six, when I embraced my faith wholeheartedly, and while living in the midst of that flush of fresh joy and the power of God’s grace, I had not just thought of the beginning of faith. Almost concurrently I could see that the culmination of faith was heavenly. We were going towards something in our Christian walk, and it was not the unseen and unknown but the hope, outlined in Scripture and promised by Jesus, that hope that at some point is seen and known. We were journeying towards God, towards eternity, towards heaven, and we were not going to be there alone. In the midst of the beauty that Revelation describes, in the midst of being with God and angels, we would be with many other believers, family and friends, from our earthly life, yes, and a whole cloud of witnesses described by name in the Letter to the Hebrews. This realization has never left me. Heaven was to be a community affair.

Have you ever thought about the fact that not only will your believing family members be with you in eternity, but you may know a few other people there as well? I don’t mean just people that you will meet there or people from your ancestral family, or Scripture, or world history, or the history of the church. That will happen, yes. But I mean others whom you have known and loved and shared in this life. Your life today.

Now, I’m sure that my beginning the topic of friendship is surprising to most. Yet, in fact, it is perfectly congruent when one thinks about earthly believers’ family and friends’ relationships of depth and spirituality.

My guess is that most of us have barely given this any thought at all. In fact, you may think to yourself, I haven’t heard this exactly this way before. You may think this is fanciful, highly imaginative, wishful dreaming, and difficult to pin down as any sort of truth. You may think that it is really reaching to even suggest that our human relationships, family relationships, and Christian friendships are imbued with an eternal capacity. You may think that unless you take a serious look at Scripture, and I don’t mean just the last chapters of Revelation, the last book of the Bible. I mean from the very beginning.

If we know anything about the nature of God as presented in the Holy Scripture, we know that God is relational. God, the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, exists in community. God is so relational that God created the world and every aspect of it to companion with him. Everything from light and darkness, sky and sea, birds and fish, heavens and earth, animals and—a human man. God pronounced it all good. Yet, there is one catch. Man does not find someone like himself. There is no other soul to whom the man can relate. Now, the great thing about this is that God completely understands this. God gets it. Why? Because God is relational. In response to man’s loneliness, God creates woman as a partner, a helpmate, and equal bearer of the mandate to be sovereign and caretaker of the earth.

In the Advent/Christmas season, we celebrate the coming of God in flesh to be with humanity, to save humanity, to be Emmanuel, God with us. We have heard the Christmas story so many times that it may have become ho-hum to us; but think about it. God, in Christ, divested of heavenly prerogatives, emptied himself, gave up most all of it, to be with us. Relational.

All through the Old Testament, there is the history of God reaching out to humanity, to Israel, to the people with whom God chose to have a personal relationship. Prophets, priests, and kings all play their divine role in relating to the Hebrew people, bringing a message of God’s love and destiny for them, if they will only wholeheartedly embrace the covenant relationship of mutual love and be faithful. It is all relational.

In the Gospels, Jesus, beginning in his earthly ministry, chooses twelve specific companions, disciples, to be with him. Relational. Even Jesus doesn’t try to go it alone without human friends.

Scripture tells us that there were also women attached to this group of disciples who supported the ministry with money and witness and service. Jesus created an entire small loyal community around him. Relational. In the end, he lost only one from this group, Judas the Betrayer.

Continuing on in Scripture, we have the letters of the disciples/apostles to the various church communities. And what are these letters about? They are about living a life in relationship to Jesus, dealing with questions that have come up in community about what it means to live as a Christian in a pagan world, what it means to live loving God and loving one another in the church, the Christian community. Relational.

When we think of relationships in eternity, we cannot skip Hebrews, which says quite clearly that we are surrounded in this life with a cloud of witnesses (identified believers) cheering us on in our lives, our race of faith. Relational. Finally, in Revelation, we see God again in tender relationship with humanity, replacing the broken, sin-filled world with a new heaven and a new earth. Scripture says the place of God will be with humanity, and he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and sorrow will be no more. God with us in a new heaven and a new earth. That is the culmination of relationship.

Relationality is a major key to understanding God—the creation—your life—yes, your friendships on earth and in heaven. One of the last things that Jesus ever said was about friendship. Jesus famously told his disciples the night before he died that he no longer called them servants—he called them friends. Relational.

The truth is that of all the important things that fill our lives, our relationships—with God—with our family—with our friends—are by far the most important. John Gottman, prominent American psychologist, researcher, and clinician, maintains in his book Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, that those in long-term happy marriages generally cite the key to their marriage is that their spouse is their best friend.¹ Current research shows that people who have, among their circle of friends, one closest friend and four other very close friends live longer and with more joy. You and I, we were made to be in meaningful relationship with others.

From the moment we are born, we are reaching out to touch another. I remember quite well a firstborn instinct in action some twenty-plus years ago when our niece was born. We were in driving distance of the city where she was born. So, we jumped into our car and drove the five hours to meet our new niece. We knew that my husband’s sister and her husband had debated about whether to have a child or not. They had a great life together!

Eventually, they decided to try to conceive, and now, just arrived, was their very new baby daughter. We hurried into the hospital to greet our sister and walked with our brother-in-law to the neonatal area where we were able to peer through the glass and view the newest member of the family. She was screaming her head off!

A nurse glanced up, saw the dad, and motioned for him to enter. He was noticeably hesitant. Me? he whispered, knowing she would lip-read his words.

Yes, she nodded definitively. With a helpless look at us, he opened the door. The nurse met him with a gown. She was determined. He was going to comfort his screaming daughter. He turned to us with a pleading, what-am-I-going-to-do look. Then, with the nurse brooking no hesitancy and motioning him on, he slowly moved to stand beside his daughter’s tiny bassinet. She continued screaming, red faced.

Then, something amazing happened. He instinctively put his hand near her little body, and immediately, she reached out and grabbed hold of his forefinger. Her tiny fingers wrapped around his hesitant finger, and she stopped crying. Immediately, she stopped crying! His face literally lit up. Later that day, as he was holding her and standing near our sister, he was beaming. Gone was the hesitancy. Gone was the reluctance, the uncertainty. Isn’t she just perfect? he said to us. Yes, I thought, she is perfect. With one instinctive gesture of reaching out in relationship, she bonded with her father for a lifetime.

We are made to be in relationship. We are created relational. Like our creator God, who is relational in being, we bear that unmistakable family resemblance. The fact is that human beings are hardwired, from the umbilical cord and throughout life, to be in meaningful relationship with others. So, knowing this, that we are made to be in meaningful relationship with others, let’s do a little exploring about what the wisest of the wise have had to say about the subject of friendship.

Now, the fact is that even before Christ, there are some profoundly wise thinkers who continue to inform our Western civilization today. For example, let’s start with Aristotle, who was a Greek and lived from 384 to 322 BC. He wrote a lot about relationships, about friendships, and their importance in his Nicomachean Ethics, book 8. I have loved the way he categorizes them with such clarity that it helps ascertain and understand our own actions and the actions of others in relationship. Aristotle maintained that all relationships/friendships can be divided into three categories: useful, pleasant, and good. When you think about it, we all have these three categories in our lives.

The useful are those we know and interact with who perform some service for us, usually for payment or some sort of recompense. Your doctor, your attorney, your teacher, your plumber, your hairdresser, your therapist, the checkout person at the grocery, the salesperson at Walmart or Target. These people are populating your life by providing useful services, and you may become acquainted with them and genuinely like them. Certainly, for the most part, you appreciate the service they provide. However, if they didn’t provide that service, it’s probable that you wouldn’t even be acquainted. My guess is that if you didn’t call back that same plumber the next time you needed a plumber, his or her feelings wouldn’t be hurt. He/she may regret losing the business, but it’s not personal. It’s useful. Think about a couple of useful relationships in your life. To identify them as useful doesn’t mean that you’re using them, in the pejorative sense. Useful relationships are beneficial to both parties. That’s how Aristotle defines useful.

Now, some of you know that my husband (I eventually remarried) and I moved from San Diego to Wheaton, in the Chicago area, in the early spring of 2016. I can tell you that one of the great challenges of moving to a new state is finding the right useful people for one’s life. We needed everything, from a new furnace technician to a new hairdresser, a new doctor, a new grocery store. Once settled, the useful category sort of fades into the background of one’s life, but in the beginning of a new environment, it is a compelling issue! Useful is important.

Aristotle’s second category is pleasant. These are the relationships that happen along the way of one’s life. It’s as if they dropped in and stayed for a while. Outside of family, this includes the vast majority of our social lives. This includes all those whose presence you enjoy; perhaps it includes your neighbors if you spend time with them, your golfing buddies, it may include the parents of your kids’ closest friends, even some of your colleagues and professional connections. We don’t want to live our lives without these pleasant relationships. Nevertheless, for most people, those who populate the pleasant category in our lives change over time. You may enjoy and look forward to being with them, but when circumstances change, well, you may or may not